Media Titans Stress Profits Over Journalistic Mission

Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, in China for the celebration of 50 years of communist rule, advised international news organizations to avoid offending sensitive governments. “Journalistic integrity must prevail in the final analysis,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that journalistic integrity should be exercised in a way that is unnecessarily offensive to the countries in which you operate.”

That’s a remarkable statement coming from a man who is likely to be overseeing CBS News after Viacom completes an expected takeover.

Redstone isn’t alone among media titans in stressing profits over journalistic mission. In 1994, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch removed the BBC from his satellite broadcasts into China at the request of Chinese officials, who did not like a BBC-aired program about Mao Tse-tung. Murdoch also canceled a book by former Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten that was critical of the Chinese leadership, which was to have been published by his HarperCollins unit. And he gave a huge contract to Deng Xiaoping’s daughter for a fawning and historically problematic portrait of her father while Murdoch was looking to expand his broadcasting operations in China. Contrast that with Time Warner’s Gerald Levin, who may have been a bit sycophantic in toasting President Jiang Zemin’s ability to recite the Gettysburg Address from memory, but whose own Time magazine was simultaneously banned from Chinese newsstands for essays by the Dalai Lama and prominent Chinese exiles.

The rapid consolidation of journalism under a small group of titans such as Redstone, Murdoch and Levin makes it that much more urgent to watch their pronouncements and respond with vigor. Yet the media, so eager to criticize Chinese influence with American politicians, have failed to cover the Chinese leadership’s sway over their own bosses.

If it’s not the job of the media to expose misdeeds and atrocities in China and elsewhere, whose job is it? If journalists are afraid of offending tyrants, what then is their purpose? It may not be possible to prevent the increasing domination of journalism by those with little love for the 1st Amendment, but we don’t need to make life easy for them.